Beto O’Rourke standing on countertops, explained

Beto O’Rourke likes to stand on countertops while campaigning for president.

It’s not a totally unreasonable thing to do. Normally at a political rally, the featured speaker would be up on an elevated stage just like any other kind of performer. But campaigning in the early primary states often features a lot of appearances in more intimate settings — house parties hosted by supporters or local notables, restaurants or coffee shop appearances, etc. There’s no stage in these kinds of places, but there generally is a countertop — so why not hop up and make your own stage?

Since everything’s a controversy in the crowded primary field, Beto’s countertop habit has launched a genre of critical takes.

Kelly Weill at the Daily Beast wrote a story titled “Baristas to Beto O’Rourke: Come On Man, Get Off Our Counters” which quoted Josh Wilson of Cohesive Coffee in Greenville, South Carolina, as complaining, “I’m sure he had a reason. But it seems like just standing would work. Beto seems to be trying harder and harder to find ways to show he’s an ‘Everyman.’”

Wilson notably was not complaining about the sanity impact of countertop standing or the extra work involved in cleaning, two concerns I’ve heard raised by Beto skeptics who aren’t professionals in the food service industry. Wilson is presumably aware that you need to clean your countertops in the course of doing business whether or not a presidential candidate stands on them — he just finds it generally obnoxious.

But while the whole countertop thing is, on one level, totally unimportant, on another level it represents the core of O’Rourke as a political phenomenon. It’s a move that blends his youthful cool-guy persona with an ability to effortlessly attract attention to himself, while also implicating the swirling currents of racial and gender privilege that surround his campaign.

The canonical Beto pose is standing on a countertop, to the extent that there is even now a Beto Standing on Counters Twitter account.

A quick perusal of the account will reveal, however, that while O’Rourke surely does enjoy standing on countertops, he also stands on all kinds of other stuff. Here he is, for example, standing on a chair.

There is also clear documentary evidence of O’Rourke standing on tables to address crowds.

This habit has prompted no small degree of mockery, including from E. Eric Thomas, who says it “seems intended to improve sight lines and perhaps subliminally connote leadership” but in reality reminds him of the “cool English teacher who watched Dead Poets Society every weekend.”

The truth is it probably is mostly about the sightlines.

O’Rourke, like Donald Trump but unlike the other candidates in the field, was a showman before he was a politician — albeit in an obscure hardcore band rather than on a network reality television show. At 6-foot-4, he doesn’t really need to be standing on a tall object to be visible, but getting taller never hurts. The fact that it’s slightly goofy, meanwhile, makes it noteworthy. Candidates for presidents make stops to talk to small groups of people all the time. But now that “Beto standing on stuff” is an official thing, anyone can take a photo of Beto standing on stuff and it will circulate. Look at him standing there! The result is that lots of pictures of Beto making banal campaign appearances will circulate while equally banal appearances by his rivals tend to get ignored.

Trump ended up winning the GOP nomination in no small part because he dominated media attention.

Beto is no Trump in this regard, but G. Elliott Morris shows that he’s outpaced his rivals in securing television coverage, despite the crowded field.

Becoming a meme over something basically innocuous, in other words, is part of a pretty good strategy to hog as much attention as possible.

But it’s also true that, in its way, climbing up onto counters and standing on tables is a way of throwing some pretty sharp elbows.

Ronald Reagan was 69 on Inauguration Day and 77 when he left office eight years later. Bernie Sanders is already 77, Joe Biden is 76, and Trump is 72. It’s only in the context of the septuagenarian frontrunners and incumbent that Elizabeth Warren — who at 69 years old today would, if she wins, be the second-oldest president ever — comes across as a relatively youthful option. (Kamala Harris, at 54 years old, wouldn’t be cashing Social Security checks in office but would still be older on Inauguration Day than Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton was.)

Beto, meanwhile, is 47. The age of the contenders is clearly a factor on voters’ minds as they assess the field, but it’s not really something that would be seemly or appropriate to raise directly.

Climbing up on top of various objects — like chatting with voters while literally running a 5k — is a good way of making the point more implicitly. It starts with getting Democrats who don’t necessarily have strong preferences about the 2020 candidates to just imagine the sheer joy of if Beto were the nominee watching him physically humiliate the prideful and loathsome Trump.

But once you have that image in your mind, it’s hard to forget that Bernie and Biden aren’t too spry either.

Another related question is how countertop shenanigans intersect with the gender dynamics vis-à-vis the women in the field. Politico’s David Siders suggested that maybe Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren should consider emulating some of Beto’s casual cool appeal.

Beyond the absurd implication that Harris (a former prosecutor) and Warren (easily the deepest thinker on policy in the Democratic Senate caucus) can’t or don’t speak without notes, the obvious question here is whether a woman could really scramble around on furniture and still be taken seriously as a potential leader.

O’Rourke is signaling that he’s not your typical politician, while women in politics are by definition not your typical politician and generally bend over backward to make sure they are presenting themselves as serious professionals in ways that might not be compatible with jumping up on a coffee shop counter.

Similarly, O’Rourke’s youth and cute family are political assets, but it’s difficult to imagine a mother leaving her three school-age children at home for a second extended campaign in two years and retaining an image as warm and friendly rather than alarmingly ambitious.

It’s not his fault that he can get away with certain things that some of his rivals probably couldn’t. His strengths are in contrast. With Biden, he presents a pretty clean case of young versus old; compared with Harris, Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand, it looks to a lot of people like a very literal case of a brash young man asking to be promoted ahead of a bunch of better-qualified women.

The countertops themselves are not important, but in that sense, they simultaneously symbolize one of the great strengths of Beto as a candidate and also why the whole idea of his candidacy strikes other observers as a somewhat enraging display of privilege.